Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “It looks so real,” Titus said.

  That was not true at all, but he sounded like he meant it. Everything had been collaged using text, drawings, graphics cut from the pages of real newspapers and magazines, and computer-printed text that attempted with moderate success to match the fonts of the original publications. Leafing through this homemade archive, Julie felt an ache in his chest, though he wasn’t sure whether it was for the crude sincerity of the archive’s fakeness or for the faked and heartfelt sincerity of Titus, saying it all looked real.

  “Totally,” Julie agreed.

  The bin also contained seven drafts, six of them handwritten in slanting longhand on prison stationery, of the film’s script; a thin sheaf of old head shots of Luther Stallings when he was Luther Stallings, poker face but with that Strutter twinkle in the eye, beautiful and young. Synopses and diagrams done mostly by hand. A red folder tabbed BUDGET that held official-looking spreadsheets, and a blue one tabbed LOCATIONS that bulged with dozens of four-by-six photographs of Chinatown, East Oakland, the museum, and the interior of a restaurant that Julie recognized as the Merritt bakery.

  A leather-grained pasteboard portfolio divulged a stack of storyboards for the film, strips of cartooned panels, executed in a style perhaps half a step above stick figure, that had been Scotch-taped to panels cut from pizza boxes. The greatest treasure and the pitiable heart of the whole archive was undoubtedly the poster, so large that it had to be folded in half to fit into the portfolio. It had been executed in colored pencil, no doubt over a long period of time, the colors laid down faint but smooth and even, as if rubbed with a tissue, giving everything the appropriate mistiness of a dream. The posed figures of Strutter and Candygirl were awkward, leggy even for Valletta Moore, and you could tell by the dead eyes and smiles that the faces had been copied, pretty accurately, from photos.

  “Jailhouse artist,” said Archy’s dad, sounding apologetic and regarding the poster with a critical expression. He smiled; there was the twinkle from the ancient head shot. It reminded Julie of Archy, and then he thought of Titus, standing on the sidewalk outside the Bruce Lee Institute, scheming this whole adventure. “But I got to say, I think it looks pretty good.”

  “Where you going to get the money to make it?” Titus said. “To make it for real, I mean.”

  “Here and there.” Luther tried to come off as playful, having a secret, then seemed to worry that he might sound like he was full of shit. “You heard of Gibson Goode?”

  Naturally, they had, Titus talking about rushing records, Grammy Awards, Julie basically grasping that the ex-quarterback had bent his wealth, legend, and magic on the destruction of Nat Jaffe and Brokeland Records.

  “Some of it’s derivating from him, payment for services rendered. Some of it, I’m going to be relying on cash flow from another source of funds, a local businessman. A, uh, a former associate, you know, an old homey of mine, always been reliable. Between what he’s willing to part with and what Goode already committed to, all told . . .” Luther tapped the red folder with a finger. “I figure I can make this movie for, like, call it a hundred K. And that’s about what I’m hoping to raise.”

  Luther’s fingers, his hands, amazed Julie. The backs of them were red-brown, fading to gold at the meridians where they met the palms. The fingers were slender, long and fluid, but you did not question their storied lethality. They looked like they had been shaped with fine tools from a regal pair of antlers.

  “You have an old friend,” Titus said, “man has that kind of money, but you sleeping in a garage.”

  Valletta laughed a low, unhappy laugh and got up from the table where she had progressed from her fingernails to painting her toes. “Boy has sense,” she said. She tucked her feet into a pair of blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals and then went tocking across the cement floor to the bathroom door, on which some airbrush master had rendered a photoreal image of a Conan the Barbarian–type character in the style of Frank Frazetta, sitting on a toilet with his ax and his sword on the floor in front of him, squeezing out a shit with a look on his face of barbaric joy. “Must come from his momma’s side of things.” She slammed the bathroom door behind her.

  “Boy, we are comfortable as hell here,” his grandfather said. “Truly. Not that I don’t hope to improve our situation. But I would prefer if you didn’t keep harping on it like that.”

  The compressor clanged the entire building like a single great fire alarm reverberating in the rebar, the air itself ringing as though struck. The noise of it was starting to get on Julie’s nerves. Somebody had started to brew up a batch of a noxious substance needed for bodywork, and it smelled to Julie like burning bananas.

  “I’m sorry,” Titus said. It was the first time Julie had ever heard him employ those words in that configuration.

  “Man ain’t exactly a friend, is the answer to your question. Let’s just say, he and I, we have some history. Long time ago, back in the Jurassic Age.” He gestured toward the ruin of the Toronado. “Motherfucking dinosaurs roamed the earth.” He interrupted himself to chuckle at his self-mockery, then seemed to lose the thread, maybe recollecting those dinosaurian days. “Dude and me, we had our misunderstandings, know what I’m saying? Water has for sure flowed under the motherfucking bridge. But he’ll come through. Basically, he wants to keep up the prosperity as a local businessman, he has to come through, is the type of situation we’re talking about.”

  It sounded sketchy to Julie, and he guessed, given what he knew about recent decades in the history of Luther Stallings, that it might have something to do with drugs. Maybe the reason that Luther had “taken a rap” and “done a bid” was so the mysterious old friend from the Jurassic Age could stay free, and now, by prior arrangement, it was time for him to repay Luther for “carrying the weight.” Or maybe, Julie thought, wildly quoting from his cinematic syllabus over the past week and forgetting that Luther was not a master thief and had only played a master thief in one semi-bad and one wretched movie, maybe it was like in The Getaway and the mystery “running buddy” had arranged to get Luther released from prison because he needed him for a job. The shadowy benefactor in Julie’s imagination took on a distinct resemblance to the actor Ben Johnson, so he was bewildered to hear Titus’s grandfather say, “Your pops knows him. Chan, Chandler Flowers, the undertaker.”

  “I know him!” Julie said, startling himself along with Luther Stallings, who seemed inclined to forget that Julie was there. “He’s on the Oakland City Council. He’s a customer at Brokeland. He likes King Curtis.”

  “King Curtis, Earl Bostic, Illinois Jacquet,” Luther Stallings agreed. “He loves all them honkers.”

  “Chan the Man,” Julie said.

  “So-called, so-called,” Luther said. “Old Chan, I tell you what, old Chan never was the flexible type. A stubborn, stiff-necked man. Eventually, I feel confident, he is going to come around.”

  “You best hope he don’t, you old fool.”

  Luther Stallings was caught as helplessly off guard as Julie and Titus. If it had been some hood or, like, Ben Johnson standing there with a .45, Luther would have been toast. So much for instincts honed by years of arcane martial arts training or by the harsh realities of prison life. Presently, Luther remembered to brandish his walking stick, but it was too late, and he knew it. Phantom slugs starred his head and torso with phantom squibs. He lowered the stick, looking disgusted. “Goddammit, Eddie!” he said. “What the hell kind of hidden refuge you running here?”

  Eddie called back to him, offhand, bored, “Oh, yeah. You have a visitor.”

  “Yo, what up, Ed?”

  “Hey, Archy. How’s the whip?”

  “Running well, looking good.”

  “Baby?”

  “No, nuh-uh, not yet. Julie, Titus. Go get in the motherfucking car.”

  Julie had known Archy Stallings since he was four years old. He tried to remember if he had ever, in all that time, seen him angry twice in one day. Luther was smiling, or showing his teeth,
anyway, a weird smile, as if he had lost money betting against some outcome that would be worse than losing. “Look at this,” he said. “Big shorty.”

  A little white mint appeared for an instant in Archy’s mouth, surfing the curl of his tongue. “Boys,” he said. “Car.”

  “Man, fuck you,” Titus said.

  For the past little while, the hour, hour and a half they had spent at Motor City, rattled by the air compressor like bones in a blender, watching Eddie Cantor’s blowtorch pirates butcher the Citation so it could be rebuilt, that magic slaughter like something out of Norse Gods and Giants, hot rod dwarves intent on replacing its headlights with diamonds and its tires with wild boars and its engine with the heart of a dragon, Valletta Moore moving on from fingernails to toes, crooking one long leg against the steel drum, craning forward so the boys were granted a fitful vision of the shadowland between her legs, which forever afterward would remain confused in Julie’s retroimagination with the vision of his homeland articulated by Luther Stallings as he snapped off stomach crunches by the abs-rippling dozen, that whole ancient Egyptian take on Oakland being a land of rebirth for the Black Man because of Pullman porters—all that while, sitting there on that skanky old sofa, Titus had seemed for the first time to relax. His angles softened, and his cords went slack. The things he said sounded sincere, unbracketed with an ironic formulation, a celebrity impression, or a parody of a gang-banging TV hood rat. His string had been jerked taut again, and Julie could not tell if it was Titus or some imaginary street Negro who said, “Man, fuck you.”

  “We having ourselves a visit,” Luther said. “My grandson and me. And my man Julius. Ain’t that right, boys?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My man. Julie reveled in the designation. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Something wrong with that?” Luther wanted to know. “You got an objection?”

  “Oh, huh, suddenly he’s your grandson.”

  “Not sudden. Been, what, how old are you, boy?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Been fourteen years.”

  “Fourteen years of you not knowing or giving a shit.”

  “You should talk.”

  “Ho, snap,” Titus said, as if he had enjoyed the retort, even though Julie could not imagine what there was to enjoy in the idea that for the fourteen years of your life, your father had cared as little about you as your grandfather. But Julie had observed that, like other black kids he knew, Titus seemed able to find humor in things that only would have made Julie feel sad.

  “How’d you find us?” Julie asked Archy.

  “A customer, owns the cab company. Mr. Mirchandani. You gave the driver your card?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Mr. M. recognized your name, he called my cell.”

  “Mr. M. is nice,” Julie said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Archy said. “Okay, come on, you been rescued, now we got to go.”

  Julie started to walk toward Archy, more than ready to go home, but when he turned to look back at Titus, he saw that they were going to be standing around having generational difficulties for a while longer.

  “Come on! I got to go to Costco, meet up with my marching band. You boys get your asses in the damn car.”

  “Go on,” Titus said. Then, softening it, “Yo, Julie, you go on home.”

  “You are planning to stay here,” Julie said. “In, like, a garage.”

  “Hello, Archy.”

  “Hey, Valletta. What’s up?”

  “Oh, you know. Just another motherfucking day in the ancient Egyptian Land of Rebirth.”

  “Say again?”

  Valletta only shook her head in an infinitesimal arc, almost a tremor, as if saying it again would cost her too much dignity.

  “So, you up for the stepmom gig this time? Step-grandmom. Seems like you’re about to have another mouth to feed.”

  “I had not heard that.”

  “That the deal, Luther? Titus gonna stay here with you?” Archy took a slow, theatrical, but keen look around the premises of Motor City Auto Body. “Doesn’t look too comfortable. You and Valletta really sleeping here?”

  Julie had been wondering that, too. He dreaded to consider the possibility that the two gray sofas, their original coloration lost to time, might be converted into places where human beings passed the night.

  “It’s all right,” Luther said.

  “Glad to hear it. Y’all got room for one more?”

  Luther didn’t answer, just stood there with his arms folded and an offended expression, moving his lips as if trying to formulate an argument for why Archy ought to show more respect. At last he shrugged and turned to Titus. “Go on, now,” he said.

  Titus crumpled. Everything bright, all the fierceness, drained out of his face. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word. It hurt Julie to see it, not because his friend was disappointed so much as because he ever could have thought Luther was going to let him stay.

  “Go on!” Luther repeated. “I know Eddie Cantor don’t plan to start running no group home anytime soon.”

  Over in the service bay, Eddie nodded, slow and firm, looking like he might be considering whether to point out to Luther that he was not running a hotel, either, or a halfway house, or a B&B.

  Titus made a wild experiment. “Grampa,” he tried. The word sounded exotic on his lips, unlikely, as though it referred to something mythical or long extinct.

  “One step at a time,” Luther said.

  “If that,” said Archy, and Valletta said, “That’s right.”

  “Go on,” Luther said. “We’ll see you again.”

  In one final, loose-limbed access of emotion, Titus went slack as a child and groaned. Then he stood up straight and rolled, walking like Strutter, past Archy and toward the open doorway of the middle bay. “Man, how can you let your father live that way?” he said.

  Julie, feeling unexpectedly that Archy, historically his favorite person in the world, was being a total douche toward Luther, who had straightened himself out and was really sorry about everything and simply needed a little help, could not bring himself to say so, but he went over to the bin on the workbench and pointed. “Do you think I could maybe have one of those head shots?” he said. “I really like your movies.”

  “What?” Luther said, watching his grandson strut angrily out into the giant blank where at one time the trains and ships of a mighty nation had come to exchange cargoes, and Oakland had fattened on war and on the flesh of San Francisco. Walking out into the ghost footsteps of his great-grandfather, who worked the docks here and got blown up one day during World War II when Vallejo, or maybe it was Martinez, exploded. “Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

  Julie went over to the plastic bin. He was about to pick up the photo when he noticed, lying in a corner of the bin, the faded and wrinkled husk, like a vacated chrysalis, purply blue, of what could only be a Batman glove. It was stained dark along the fingers and fraying at the seams. It had the little old-school fins, and Julie guessed it was the same vintage as the door that hung from Sixto Cantor’s wall, with its red bat logo. In his imagination—patrolling the streets of Genosha or Wakanda or the corridors of Blue Area of the Moon in MTO—Dezire wore long purple gloves. It had never occurred to Julie that they ought to have fins. He snatched up the stray glove and shoved it down into the pocket of his cutoffs.

  “Do you have a pen?” Julie asked Archy when he had chosen the picture he wanted and turned away from the bin.

  Archy put a warning in his voice. “Julie.”

  “I want to get an autograph. Come on. Don’t be a dick.”

  “ ‘Don’t be a dick.’ That’s how you’re going to talk to me.”

  “I want. An autograph.”

  Archy fished a pen out of his pocket and click-clicked it. Then he handed it to Julie.

  “You tell him it’s just a matter of time,” Luther said in a low voice as he scratched the pen across the bottom right corner of the photo. “Soon as my associates come through.
After that, him and me can talk it over, see what’s possible.”

  That was when Julie knew the Strutter 3 venture was doomed, if not imaginary. He determined on the spot to see that it came true, that it happened, that Strutter was resurrected one last time to kick it old-school, for the sake of Titus, for the sake of Luther, and for the sake of the world of cinema, too.

  DON’T LOSE THAT DREAM, Luther wrote. BEST WISHES, LUTHER STALLINGS .

  The late Randall “Cochise” Jones, his mortal remains. Washed, powdered, painted. Conduits and chambers flooded with aldehydes. Broken ribs set. Eyelids sealed, jawbone wired shut, fingernails trimmed close as in life, fingers woven into a trellis on the belly. Vestigial smile of forgiveness. Hallucinogenic Ron Postal leisure suit that cost three hundred dollars in 1975. Stacy Adams Spectators, two-tone blue and white. Thick ginger-gray flag of hair flown stubbornly to the left, as in life. Stashed like some fine tool or instrument in the velour darkness of a casket prepaid since 1997. The velour a specified shade of purple called zinfandel. Satin pillow propping up the ten-pound head. Exterior of the casket done up in a rich oak finish like the cabinet of a Leslie speaker, then trimmed out like the lost ark with finials and gargoyles of gold plate. Loaded onto a mortuary cot, ready to ride up the freight elevator to the garage at the back of Flowers & Sons Funeral Home, where a pristine 1969 Oldsmobile 98 Cotner Bevington, borrowed for the occasion from a funeral home up in Richmond, waited to ferry it over to Brokeland Records. Here the body would be laid out for a combination wake and funeral scheduled to begin at eleven A.M. and to last until three P.M. or the refreshments ran out. When the living had concluded their business of farewell, the casket would be rolled back to the capacious rear section of the hearse. Half an hour later, at Mountain View Cemetery, it would be put into the ground alongside what remained of the dead man’s second wife, Fernanda. And that would be the end of that. Mr. Jones’s funeral plan had called for the use of Flowers and Sons’ vintage 1958 Cadillac, but the Caddy had come down with a pain in the alternator. Even if Mr. Jones had known of the substitution, he hardly could have faulted the magnificent Olds 98, batlike and swooping, ready to haul ass through even the shadowiest valley.